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“We need to change the way the people we love are dying,” Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist and Conversation Project founder Ellen Goodman told an attentive audience in Bethlehem during her presentation on “The Most Important Conversation America Isn’t Having,” sponsored by the Dr. and Mrs. Max Littner Memorial Lecture Series and St. Luke’s University Health Network.

“Church Basement Ladies,” the latest offering through May 14 in The Pines Dinner Theatre’s eighth season, is a musical-comedy gem, filled with hand-clapping songs, witty lyrics and crazy antics.

The musical, written by Jim Stowell and Jessica Zuehlk, was inspired by the best-selling book “Growing Up Lutheran,” a humorous remembrance by Janet Letnes and Suzann Nelson of being Lutheran in the Midwest during the 1950s.

Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist and founder-director of The Conversation Project, will speak on “The Most Important Conversation America Isn’t Having” at the seventh annual Dr. and Mrs. Max Littner Memorial Lecture Series for Bereavement, 7:30 p.m. April 19, Central Moravian Church, Main and Church streets, Bethlehem. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

The lecture is also sponsored by St. Luke’s University Health Network.

The third time is supposed to be the “charm,” but possibly not where theatrical productions are concerned.

Despite a Pulitzer Prize-winning script by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman that gained the reputation as one of the most popular and successful plays of modern times, Pennsylvania Playhouse’s third staging of “You Can’t Take It With You,” continuing through April 9, got off to a slow start and never quite hit the mark.

A trip to Ireland inspired “Pints, Pounds and Pilgrims,” one of the funniest of the Crowded Kitchen Players’ productions now playing in honor of St. Patrick’s Day through March 19 at The Unicorn Theatre, 417 Front St., Catasauqua.

There are many different kinds of beauty pageants, but only one very special Pennsylvania Miss Amazing contest, where this year 20 girls and women with disabilities vied for recognition and prizes in the second annual event at the Lehigh Valley Charter HS for the Arts in South Bethlehem.

The contestants, ranging in age from 6 to 37 years old, came from throughout the state.

Civic Theatre of Allentown’s production of “9 to 5: The Musical,” continuing through Feb. 26, is full of surprises. When you least expect it, a minor character belts out a rousing song, or someone from the ensemble does a “George Spelvin” walk-on that’s good for a laugh while distracting the audience’s attention from the scene changes.

It has been said that the first day a patient goes for chemotherapy is the scariest day of her life. As a way to make the experience less scary, and to bring some comfort to those undergoing the treatment for the first time, a group of volunteers in the Lehigh Valley distribute hundreds of comfort bags each year at local chemo infusion centers.

The group, known as The CHEMO Bag, was started in 2013 by Leah Walia, a nurse who herself had gone through chemotherapy. Her daughter Michelle, now 11, came up with the acronym: Caring Helping Encouraging Motivating Others.

“The Explorers Club” uses humor and exaggeration to satirize the smugness of 19th Century male-dominated British society.

There’s a lot to poke fun at: chauvinism, imperialism and racism, to name only a few, in 1879 London, the setting for the comedy.

The club is modeled after those all-male bastions, such as the Royal Society, which did not admit female fellows until 1945, and the French Academy of Sciences, which managed to keep out Marie Curie and other women until 1979.